flyinghaggis

I was tempted by the Retail for freedom to upgrade my licensing terms and the ability to chose between 32-bit/64-bit on install but the prices are so extortionate that it's just not worth it. I bought Home Premium OEM for £70. If I'd gone for the retail version it would have been 3 times the price at around £210! It'll be interesting to see just how lenient MS are when users start upgrading and replacing failed hardware. I'd have to buy 3 copies of the OEM to come near the cost of the retail so it's a risk worth taking as far as I'm concerned.

I generally use TugZip for opening less commom ZIP formats such as RAR,etc. http://www.tugzip.com

I'd go for the Cereron aswell. Would be worth checking out the motherboards too to see what kind of expansion slots they have available. Likely the AMD one might only have a 4X AGP slot which might limit you in gaming performance.

The FAQ seems to suggest it's an additional $10 workstation per year onto your software assurance price. Guess that would translate to about £7.50 for us over the pond in rip-off Britain! Not too bad if viewed as an entire methodology of packaging/deploying software and auditing all of your kit. Hopefully manufacturers will start making softgrid packages available with their software to save having to image the stuff ourselves. Guess it's unlikely because of the piracy/copying implications though.

We originally had our windows XP loan laptops configured to use staff's own accounts off domain with cached files. It quickly became obvious after users having to log in multiple times to get files/authentication cached offline that it was more trouble than it was worth. That and it wouldn't sync up shared areas cleanly when multiple users started logging onto the same laptop. As a result staff got confused what to expect and where to find things when the logged on them. Then came the showstopper when one teacher deleted all of their files on the laptop and it would have deleted all of their files on the network server then next time they sync'd if we hadn't realised what had happened! Admittedly you can stop this by changing the sync policy. We've ended up going back to just setting up local accounts on the laptops and disabling network access on them so they are only ever used as standalone computers. Staff then transfer files via USB sticks as others have suggested. Hopefully MS will put some more thought into how offline files and laptops work when Vista's released. Setting it up in XP using network files/accounts feels like it was an afterthough on Microsoft's part.

I seem to be posting on this board every 15 mins today! Just been checking back after the reply from the tech support at ABTutor. I didn't realise before but in ABTutor that you can password protect the client Groups/Rooms of computers and specify exactly what options a teacher will have when using it in a specific room to the nth degree. Basically this means that I can disable the remote file execute parts and policy/port blocking options so staff cant tinker with these bits which is exactly what I was after. Suffice to say I'm pretty much 100% sold on ABTutor now 8)

Sorry, When I said Lanview I meant Lanschool! No need to apologise. Sounds like we're both arguing the same point. Like you say it's not really a flaw with regards to admin's running the software but we're looking for something we can give staff to let them monitor a classroom full of pupils and i don't want to give them anything where they could accidentally or intentionally cause issues with the PCs. I think the key features a monitoring tool needs to have is the ability to view multiple screens at once and the ability to lock workstations when pupils should be listening to the teacher. We've tried using VNCon but have found it to be pretty unstable and if I recall it's not being developed anymore. I've found the interface for Netsupport school a bit confusing so it's looking like either Lanschool or ABTutor are the contenders at the moment. At the moment I prefer ABTutor so hopefully the coders will be able to fix the remote executable security hole. In theory like you say it shouldn't be too hard to fix. Just a case of not allowing the code to be launched if it detects that nobody's logged onto the workstation

ABtutor and Netsupport School let you run code on a remote PC when it's sitting at the logon prompt waiting for someone to log (Lanschool doesn't let you do this as the option is greyed out if no users are logged onto a workstation). The problem is that this lets you run word/iexplore/etc (and it runs as the logged on user which is system because it's at the logon prompt). You cant actually see the application at this point but the next user that logs on sees it on their desktop and is running it as system with full access to the computer. It's just as though you had logged on as a pupil and used the run as... command to launch that app as system. I've just got a respnse back from ABTutor who have been able to reproduce the problem and are going to look into it. I'll let you know when I get an update.

You honestly wouldn't call the ability for any pupil/teacher to remotely run any executable/program with full system level user level privileges a security flaw 8O I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one cause I see it as being a show stopper for any application we consider running on the network. I've just tried Lanschool and they're the only one of the 3 products that has the sense to disable to option when nobody's logged onto a PC so they're looking like the best option so far. I've sent an email to ABTutor so I'll see if I get a reply back. It's a shame because I actually like ABTutor better than Lanview (plus it's cheaper) but I can’t risk giving it to staff if it lets them run programs as system and the ability to permanently block IP ports on workstations.

Dont know whether to laugh or cry! Just tried out Netsupport School and it's got exactly the same remote execute as system security flaw as ABTutor. At least it by default doesn't execute remote applications if noone is logged in though.

I knew I had a bad feeling that ABTutor gave users too much power. Just found what appears to be a major security hole with it. If a teachers fires up an application on a PC and no-one is logged onto it (ie a PC sitting at the logon screen) then then next time someone logs on that applications pops up and is RUNNING WITH SYSTEM LEVEL PRIVELEDGES 8O Launched word and with a pupil account and was able to delete every file in program files and access every area on drive C! I think I might send the dev team and Email to let them know cause that's pretty scary stuff....

We're in the process of looking at monitoring software to allow the staff to view their classes. We've still not decided whether to just go for a monitoring application or to look into something more fully featured. I've just looked at ABTutor and I'm really impressed with both the features and the price. In fact it's so fully featured that I think it gives the staff too much control. I dont like the thought of the staff being able to blocked network ports on PC's or setting up permanent policy changes on them to restrict applications and windows features. Is there any way to limit what functionality staff have in ABTutor as it would be perfect for what we want to do if we could chop out a couple of the options! I'm just away to have a look at Netsupport School and Lanschool (both full and just the monitor) so post my thoughts when Iv'e been through them.

I assumed that because it was set in firmware that it wouldn't matter if you changed it in windows. Is there a setting you modified on the PC or in the registry to change the region? What software are you using to image the PCs?

That's a handy little trick! I'm a massive fan of the VLC but i think staff may struggle with the user interface as they're used to PowerDVD. Did you notice if the PC DVD drives you've bought this year were set to region2 as the default or did you have to set the drive region yourself on every new PC?

I'm not sure if this should be a hardware or a windows problem but we've just realised that the DVD drives in the PC's we've bought in the last year don’t have any default region set. Because of this none of them can play any DVD's with any region encoding on them (which is pretty much every DVD in existence!). This setting itself is physically set on the DVD-ROM Drives firmware so there's no simple windows registry edit that will fix it. Obviously it's easy enough for us to change it on the PC's but we've got 100 PCs like this (maybe more) and we don’t want to have to go round each on individually. We've looked into the options and MS have a piece of code that can allegedly set it. I've not compiled it to see if it will work yet but it's on the following page:- http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/DVDregion.mspx I'm slightly worried by the fact this is an archived paper written in 2001 but it's all I can find about the subject. Users can't change the setting as it appears to requir administrator privileges to alter it. As far as I can see the only options are to create a Wininstall start-up script or to make an Auto-It script to change every drive to region 2. I'm a bit wary of doing either when it updates firmware on a device in the PC though. Has anyone else encountered this problem with DVD regions not being set on new drives they've bought recently? Does anyone know of any easier ways to set this in remotely on multiple PC’s? TIA

That looks really cool. I worked for a company that used Softgrid(when it was owned by Softricity) in the past and it was an awesome product in terms of the flexibility it offered. It's about time MS offer change control for Group Policy and the software/hardware asset tool would be useful aswell. Does anyone know if it's only available for use with Vista or can you use the Desktop Optimisation pack with XP aswell?

Cheers for the replies, Like you say I think that because they're a large company whenever we've got a problem it always ends up being escalated to a level it shouldn't have to reach just because it's difficult to get to speak to an individual who's actually willing to take on a problem and has the authority to make a call regarding issues like this. It's just really frustrating as you feel like nobody's listening when you contact Dell for help regarding a problem. I've spoken with our account manager since this thread started in September and we were told that we hadn't hit the failure rate required for a bulk replacement (currently we're at 17%). She wouldn't actually give me a percentage required to action this though but if anyone knows the magic number it would be useful to have at hand!

It's looking like Dell's reply is just to ignore us an hope we go away :? We're seriously considering moving away from Dell as we're looking at a 25% failure rate in 3 years and Dell aren't interested in doing anything about it except getting us to arrange warranty call-out every time one fails. This takes several hours as everytime time you call you get put on hold, then have to go through the same checklist, diagnostics to get them to send out a replacement PSU! Our account manager's (we've had several) only ever seem to be interested in speaking to you when you're purchasing stuff from them. Whenever you've a problem or ask for information they just aren't interested. Our warranty runs out in 6 months time and then we're going to be left having to buy PSU's in bulk for what's clearly a manufacturing issue that Dell wont awknowledge. We run our PCs on a 5 year refurb plan and based on the current rate of failures we'll be lucky if we've 25% still working by then. To say I'm hacked off is an understatement..........

I've just upgraded from a P4-1.8Ghz 1GB (RDRAM!) and built myself a new Core2Duo 6600, 1Gb RAM and Nvidia 7600GT. I'm currently using Vista RC1 and everything's running pretty smoothly. It could probably benefit from another Gb of RAM though the official release of Vista is apparantly less memory hungry than RC1 so it might be OK in the short term. It's definitely a massive improvement over my old P4 which was struggling with counterstrike CS2 and took forever when encoding video. I scrimped a bit on the video card as I didn't want to spend a lot of cash what with the new Nforce 8800's and DX10 around the corner cause I know I'll want one 8)

http://www.smarttop.nl/index.html Saw these at SETT this year. Thought they looked pretty cool! 8)

They've just sent us the latest version of the software which has turned out to be exactly the same as the 5 year old version we're having probems with

The Key's in:- [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] Value = C:\pagefile.sys 1536 3072 If you change the initial 1536 to 3072, so both values are the same, this will allow director 6.0 programs to run (requires a reboot to take effect) but I'm not sure if there are any possible consequences to doing this (other than wasting disk space). I'd hoped there would be a better way of fixing the problem as I'm not keen on the idea of changing virtual memory settings on nearly 100 PC's just to fix a bug with a couple of old pieces of software. Specifically I was wondering if there was anyway of updating a Director 6.0 based program to a newer version (which would presumably fix the bug)? I'm guessing there's probably no way to modify a director app without the source code/files but I'm not familiar with director so hoped there might be a way to do it! The main problem application is Business@work by the SQA. I've sent them an email but haven't got a response as to whether they can provide a more up to date version though.

Since we've started buying PC's with 1Gb RAM we've run into a bug with Macromedia Director 6.0 where it complains that it cannot run because it requires at least 3Mb of Virtual Memory. It appears to be a problem with the way that director reads the virtual memory setting on an XP PC as you can resolve the problem by changing the initial virtual memory size to less than 1GB or over 3Gb but I'm not keen to do this on all of the PC's in school as we're concerned it could affect performance and potentially cause issues with other software. I've found the registry key to do this if anyone needs if though. Does anyone know if there's any way to fix this problem other than playing about with the Virtual Memory settings on PC's.

Cheers for the quick reply, We'll give our account manager at Dell a call and see what we can work out. We've been experiencing on average a failure a week since we've got back from the summer hols because of this issue and I dont want to have to be on the phone to Dell tech support for several hours every week arranging replacement and running diagnostics for a known issue. That and we'll be out of warranty soon! I'll let you know what their response is :?

We've been having loads of problems with PSU failures on our Dell Optiplex GX270's. The general fault is that the power LED flickers orange and the unit wont power on 75% of the time after shutting it down. Power Cylcing it several times in a row temorarily resolves the problem but it always re-occurs. We've had to replace about a dozen of the 90 PC's we bought 2 years ago (12% failure rate in 2 years). This is also a concern because we've out of warranty in another years time and based on the current failure rate we'll be lucky if we've any left running by the time they get to be 5 years old! I've been hunting online and it seems be caused by a capacitor fault in the PSU units so even though i've no definite proof i'm near certain it's a manufacturing fault caused by the faulty capacitors that were prolific a couple of years ago. Has anyone else on here had a similar problem? I'm away to speak to our account manager about the issue as I feel it's a manufacturing/design fault that will ultimately affect all of these PCs and that Dell should replace all of the PSU's in the affected models?